Neohelicon XXXV (2008) 1, 145–156

DOI: 10.1007/s11059-008-3011-0

ELIAS POLIZOES

SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY

“IN THE WAKE OF ROMANTICISM”

Divided into three parts, this article investigates how Johan Huizinga and Walter
Benjamin draw upon romantic formulations regarding the difference between symbol and
allegory in their respective books on the Middle Ages and the Baroque. The first part of
the article offers a close reading of the “Symbolism in its Decline” chapter of Herfsttij der
Middeleeuwen (The Autumn of the Middle Ages) (1919) to show how Huizinga sides
with Goethe in his preference for symbol over allegory. The second part of the article ex-
amines the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama)
(1928) to decode Walter Benjamin’s account of how “in the wake of Romanticism” a no-
tion of the symbol derived from Classicism was deployed to underwrite a conservative
critical practice. The third part pits Benjamin’s allegorical order against Huizinga’s sym-
bolical one and shows that the latter’s humanism provides a less penetrating criticism of
modernity as an ongoing process.

1. THE SUBVERSIONS OF ALLEGORY

In The Autumn of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, Johan Huizinga contests Jacob
Burckhardt’s claim, formulated in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860),
that the “Middle Ages were essentially the ages of allegory”.1 For Huizinga the Mid-
dle Ages were defined by symbolism, which only goes into decline once allegory
gains ascendancy in the fourteenth century.2 Huizinga writes that the image of the

1
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by S. G. C. Middle-
more (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 262.
2
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich
Mammitsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Henceforth, to be cited in parenthe-
ses as Autumn, in the text. A short digression on the title and translation of Huizinga’s volume is
in order. It was originally translated into English by F. Hopman in 1924 as The Waning of the
Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in
the XIVth and XVth Centuries. An abridged edition, it also mistranslated the volume’s title,
which in the original Dutch is Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. “Herfsttij” (cf. the German “Herbst”)
means autumn and, by paronomasia, harvest. Generally speaking, what Huizinga sought to elab-
Elias Polizoes, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Western Ontario,
University College 258, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada; E-mail: epolizoe@gmail.com
0324–4652/$20.00 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
© 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Springer, Dordrecht
146 ELIAS POLIZOES

world medieval symbolism evokes is one of “harmonious connectedness” (Autumn

239). He then goes on to argue that while allegory was eventually pressed into service
to build elaborate and all-embracing systems, the totalities it fashioned were held to-
gether in an arbitrary and haphazard manner.
Writing in the wake of Benedetto Croce,3 Huizinga sees allegory as mechanical
and affirms that its rise results from a way of thinking that elevates reason over emo-
tion. This stance on allegory inflects his work with an anti-modernist spirit in line
with Dilthey’s Lebensphilosphie. As a consequence, Huizinga’s understanding of the
medieval past appeals to what Brian Stock calls the “primitive aspect of the Middle
Ages”, which, after Rousseau, “had begun to the take shape of a myth”. “As industri-
alization gradually affected larger and larger groups of people”, writes Stock, “whole
segments of medieval utopian thinking were rudely revived and pressed into service.
The Middle Ages began to be associated with a lost state of innocence: for the moral-
ist, they were paradise without sin; for the socialist, without property.” 4
Huizinga proposes that the Middle Ages “never forgot that everything would be
absurd if it exhausted its meaning in its immediate function and form of manifesta-
tion, and that all things extend in an important way into the world beyond” (Autumn
235). He adds that according to such a notion of symbolism, all things, by being free
of accidental properties and composed only of essences, are intrinsic signs. They sig-
nify thanks to “an intellectual shortcut” (236), in that sense they can be said to partake
of the immediacy that for Goethe defines the temporality of the Romantic symbol:
There is a great difference according to whether the poet is seeking access to the general
through the particular or sees the general in the particular. From the first of these approaches,
allegory is born; in this the particular has value solely as an example of the general. The sec-
ond approach is nevertheless properly the nature of poetry: it states a particular without think-
ing on the basis of the general and indicating it. But the reader who immediately grasps this
particular receives the general at the same time, without realizing it, or realizing it only later.5

orate in his study was not so much the waning of the Middle Ages, as an account of the period’s
achievement. The English translation, which first appeared in 1924, misses the pun in the title, as
does the French translation, Le Declin du Moyen Age (Paris: Payot, 1932), while the Italian,
L’Autunno del medio evo, translated by Bernardo Jasink (Firenze: Sansoni, 1961), retains the lit-
eral sense of the original, as does the 1996 English retranslation. In what follows, I will be con-
sidering the “Symbolism in its Decline” chapter, pp. 234–248.
3
Croce viewed the practice of allegory as a “science, or art aping science”, and called it “an ex-
pression externally added to another expression”. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Ex-
pression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie (New York: The Noonday Press,
1962), p. 34.
4
Brian Stock, “Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism”, in Listening for the Text: On the
Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 66.
5
Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, translated by Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1982), p. 204. For a more colloquial (and less precise) translation of this aphorism,
see Maxims and Reflections, translated by Elisabeth Stopp (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp.
33–34 (aphorism 279).
SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY “IN THE WAKE OF ROMANTICISM” 147

With the help of symbolism, writes Huizinga, “thought attempts to find the con-
nection between things, not by tracing the hidden turns of their causal ties, but rather
by suddenly jumping over these causal connections” (Autumn 236). As such, rather
than seek the general through the particular, which for Huizinga amounts to an inves-
tigation of the world that works to discern not only relations of cause and effect but
also the boundaries that demarcate one thing from another, symbolism gives the me-
dieval mind a boost and allows it see the general in the particular. In order to explain
this, Huizinga gives the example of white and red roses blooming among thorns:
The medieval mind immediately sees in this fact symbolic significance: virgins and martyrs
shine in glory among those who persecute them. How is this postulate of identity achieved?
By virtue of the identity of the qualities: beauty, tenderness, purity. The blood red tint of the
roses is also that of the virgin and the martyr. But this connectedness is only truly meaningful
and full of mystic significance if the linkage, the quality, the essence between the two constit-
uents of the particular symbolism are shared by each of them. In other words, where red and
white are regarded not as mere labels for physical differences on a quantitative basis, but as
real entities, as realities themselves (236–237).

If the things of the world are mystically interconnected, and if symbolism allows
the mind to spontaneously grasp this interconnectedness, it is because the qualities
that flow between one thing and another do so as synecdoches, rather than meto-
nymies. Each and every thing, in other words, is a part in which the paradigm of the
universe is reflected, as opposed to being a link in a chain of parts pieced together
syntagmatically.
Taken on its own, the question of the general and the particular need not be attrib-
uted to a specific proper name. In that respect, it could be argued that Goethe’s pres-
ence in The Autumn of the Middle Ages may in the end be limited to a certain affinity
we can discern between Huizinga’s presentation of medieval symbolism and the tem-
porality of the romantic symbol. But as Huizinga works out the epistemology peculiar
to symbolism he borrows wholesale from Goethe and cites two of the German poet’s
late aphorisms on the difference between symbol and allegory:
Allegory transforms an object of perception into a concept, the concept into an image, but in
such a way that the concept continues to remain circumscribed and completely available and
expressible within the image.
Symbolism transforms an object of perception into an idea, the idea into an image, and
does it in such a way that the idea always remains infinitely operative and unattainable so that
even if it is put into words in all languages, it remains inexpressible. 6

Describing it as an “inarticulate feeling” (Autumn 235), Huizinga defines symbol-

ism as “pre-intellectual” and as a “muting of rational thought” (239). Symbolism
helps the mind understand the inexpressible, but it does so without recourse to the
concept, which for Goethe works to allow allegory to circumscribe particulars, trans-

6
Ibid., p. 205 (aphorisms 1112 & 1113). This pair of passages is found on page 238 of The Autumn
of the Middle Ages.
148 ELIAS POLIZOES

forming them into mere examples of the general. Huizinga notes that with the rise of
fourteenth-century secularism, and as a consequence of the change in the medieval in-
tellectual climate toward causal-scientific thinking, the Middle Ages witnessed a shift
from the primitivism and unmediated unity of the symbol to the rationality of
allegory.
By drawing so explicitly on Goethe in a context patently foreign to the romantic
source of his observations, Huizinga seems to be writing not as a medievalist but as
one in tune with the anti-allegorical aesthetic ideology of such contemporaries of his
as William Butler Yeats and Paul Valéry. According to the first, the symbol is “reve-
lation”7 and allegory an amusement that is “always seeking to reduce everything to a
lifeless and slavish uniformity”.8 For the second, allegories are so many “didactic”
poems that “derive a part of their substance and interest from notions that could have
been treated in the most indifferent prose”.9 Were we to enlarge our perspective even
further, we could suggest that the popularity Huizinga’s volume was later to enjoy
among the Anglo-American New Critics was perhaps in part due to their conviction
that “the glory of the symbol is part of the nature of poetry”. 10
Huizinga argues that the late medieval turn to allegory brought along with it a new
“visual tendency” (Autumn 248) in the form of personification. “Everything that
could be thought”, he writes, “had become plastic and pictorial” (248). Rather than al-
low the mind to see the general directly in the reality of the particular, as is the case
with the intuitive immediacy of symbolism, allegory transforms the objects of percep-
tion into concepts, which are then given both a human shape and an agency commen-
surate to the finitude of the vice or value in question. For Hegel, such an “allegorical
being” can only be “frosty and cold”, due to the “intellectual abstractness of its mean-
ings”.11 In stark contrast to symbolism, which “never allows the fire of the mystic life
to be extinguished” (Autumn 239), personification can only evoke a cadaver. The
bodies it sets into motion are “hollow”12 and in no way informed by symbolism’s
“continuous transfusion of the feeling for God’s majesty and for eternity into every-
thing that can be perceived and thought” (Autumn 239). A personification, as a conse-
quence, “in neither its content nor its external shape, is truly in itself a subject or indi-
vidual; on the contrary, it remains the abstraction of a universal idea which acquires
only the empty form of subjectivity and is to be called a subject only, as it were, in a

7
William Butler Yeats, “William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy”, in Essays
and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 116.
8
Ibid., p. 122.
9
Paul Valéry, “A Forward”, in Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958),
vol. 7 (The Art of Poetry, translated by Denise Folliot), p. 40.
10
Jonathan Arac, “Afterword: Lyric Poetry and the Bounds of New Criticism”, in Lyric Criticism:
Beyond New Criticism, edited by Chaviva Hošek & Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985), p. 352.
11
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1975), vol. 1, p. 399.
12
Ibid.
SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY “IN THE WAKE OF ROMANTICISM” 149

grammatical sense”.13 Rhetorically illustrating his agreement with Hegel, Huizinga

writes that allegory, an “intentional expression”, is “the transposition” of symbol-
ism’s “passionate cry into a grammatically correct sentence” (Autumn 238).
Allegory calls symbolic thinking to order; yet it so by turning the image that sym-
bolism makes of the world on its head. Allegory is a “reverse symbolism” (Autumn
242) portrayed as a revolutionary: it arrives on the medieval scene to topple what had
once appeared to be “an indissoluble order of rank, an architectural structure, a hierar-
chical subordination” (238). As it does this it evokes a new understanding of the
world according to which “the lower does not point to the higher, but rather the higher
to the lower” (242). Transcendence, in other words, takes precedence over imma-
nence, and as a consequence of this the “meaningful”, which for Huizinga is com-
prised by the order of things as imagined by symbolism, is rendered “meaningless”
(247). As Huizinga sides with Goethe with respect to the symbol, it seems he has no
choice but to accept Goethe’s conclusions about allegory. The results are drastic. In
its endeavour to make sense of this upside-down world, the medieval subject is forced
into an investigation of particulars. Conceptual, such an activity applies the abstract
and disembodied syntax of the general as it deploys the higher in order to understand
the lower. At best, any allegory that would result from this procedure can only be ten-
tative, and at worst, arbitrary and haphazard, given that the world of particulars it
would marshal into a whole will always outstrip even the most elaborate arrangement.

2. THE TYRANNY OF THE SYMBOL

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin argues that, due to the neg-
ative characterization of allegory endemic to the German university system, the ba-
roque Trauerspiel continued to elude critical attention well into the 1920s. Derived
from Classicism, and then institutionalized by conservative Weimar academic cul-
tural politics, this anti-allegorical prejudice favoured an interpretative praxis but-
tressed by the ideational logic of the symbol. Blind to works of art at odds with the pu-
tative seamlessness of classical unity, this model of interpretation, writes Benjamin, is
predicated upon a distortion of the “genuine notion” of the symbol, “which is the one
used in the field of theology”. 14 He explains:
The unity of the material and transcendental object, which constitutes the paradox of the theo-
logical symbol, is distorted into a relationship between appearance and essence. The introduc-
tion of this distorted conception of the symbol into aesthetics was a romantic and destructive
extravagance which preceded the desolation of modern art criticism. As a symbolic construct,
the beautiful is supposed to merge with the divine in an unbroken whole. (Origin 160).

13
Ibid.
14
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1977), pp. 159–160. Henceforth, to be cited in parentheses as Origin, in the text.
150 ELIAS POLIZOES

Once modelled after the entelechy of such a distorted understanding of the symbol,
the artwork is to be thought of as a particular through which a generalized beauty can
be said to shine forth untroubled by the vicissitudes of history. Beauty is made over as
eternal. Benjamin takes aim against this rarefied construction of the beautiful, and
claims that it is a yearning “after a resplendent but ultimately non-committal knowl-
edge of an absolute” (159). Little more than “illegitimate talk”, what it says about the
artwork lacks “dialectical rigour” and as a consequence “fails to do justice to content
in formal analysis and to form in the aesthetics of content” (160).
Regardless of the fact Benjamin seems to have been unaware of Huizinga at the
time of the composition of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the critique of the
symbol that he brings to bear in his study of the baroque Trauerspiel amounts to noth-
ing short of an implicit indictment of the aesthetic assumptions that underwrite
Huizinga’s celebration of medieval symbolism. Like Huizinga, Benjamin, too, makes
recourse to Goethe and to romantic formulations of symbol and allegory. But where
Huizinga figures allegory as subversive, Benjamin introduces the longstanding reign
of the symbol by personifying it as a “usurper”:
For over a hundred years the philosophy of art has been subject to the tyranny of a usurper
who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of romanticism (Origin 159).

That Benjamin strategically deploys such coded rhetoric in the first sentence of the
“Allegory and Trauerspiel” chapter should not go unnoticed, particularly given the
detailed elaboration of the theory of sovereignty he offers earlier in the volume. The
positive pairing of the baroque with Expressionism that Benjamin draws near the end
of the “Epistemo-Critico Prologue” (Origin 53–56) finds a negative counterpart here
in the link he makes between seventeenth-century political intrigue and the machina-
tions of conservative Weimar cultural politics.
Unlike Ancient Greek tragedy, which appeals to myth for its subject matter, the ba-
roque Trauerspiel, writes Benjamin, draws directly upon “the events of history itself”
(63) for its material. By doing so, it turns away from the timelessness of legend to in-
scribe itself in the very fabric of historical life. “Baroque drama knows no other his-
torical activity than the corrupt energy of schemers” (88), and it is with this statement
in mind that Benjamin looks more than a hundred years into the past to Classicism,
“the symbolizing mode of thought of around 1800” (161), where he locates the source
of the “persistent anti-baroque prejudices” (163) prevalent in Weimar academic cul-
ture. Petty calculators, the protagonists of this regime work through institutional
channels to limit allegory to little more than “a playful illustrative technique” (162).
They harbour an “antagonism” (161) toward a dialectical and conceptual understand-
ing of art, and conspire to keep allegory as “the dark background against which the
bright world of the symbol might stand out” (161).
It is clear – and not just from the above – that Benjamin was well aware that The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, his Habilitationsschrift, would meet with resistance
from the scholarly community. He knew that to write about the baroque in an anti-ba-
roque climate required that he undertake nothing short of a rehabilitation of allegory.
SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY “IN THE WAKE OF ROMANTICISM” 151

More importantly, Benjamin also recognized that such a task entailed challenging the
very professors who championed notions of art that he took to be distorted. The
stakes, in other words, intellectual as well as professional, were high. What is curious,
perplexing even, is that Benjamin went to the effort of placing a personification of the
symbol as a usurper at the outset of his second chapter, the very middle of his presen-
tation of the baroque Trauerspiel. An allegory of the reactionary cultural politics he
and his book were destined to face, this short text asked those judging his suitability
for the academy to decode a tale about themselves.
Placed in so prominent a position, Benjamin’s personification allegory calls for
decoding. We can begin to do this by recalling how Romanticism, in an attempt to
overcome a two-centuries-long disenchantment of the world (the “breakdown of the
classical alliance between humans, nature, and God”15 inaugurated by the baroque),
constructed the symbol as a synthesis of the mind and nature. To do this, it inscribed
the autonomy of the aesthetic onto the natural world, which it conceived of as a total-
ity. Once idealism gained institutional status as the “orthodoxy in the culture of the
German mandarins”,16 the romantic reliance upon the authority and integrity of na-
ture was ideologically transformed into an aesthetic defence mechanism designed to
ward off the hostile effects of modernity – “the chaos which followed in the wake of
romanticism”.
What then of the “usurper” that, for over a hundred years, has subjected the philos-
ophy of art to the weight of his tyranny? In order to unpack what is at stake for
Benjamin in this personification, we must take a detour and briefly look at the
“Trauerspiel and Tragedy” chapter of The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
Unlike the baroque monarch, whose “most important function”, explains
Benjamin, is to “avert” the “state of exception”, the usurper in question seems much
closer to the “the modern concept of sovereignty”, which “amounts to a supreme ex-
ecutive power on the part of the prince” (Origin 65). The usurper, in short, is the one
who invokes the state of exception. As a consequence, in the opening lines of the “Al-
legory and Trauerspiel” chapter what we make out is a not-too-subtle invocation of
Carl Schmitt’s provocative volume from 1922, Political Theology.

15
Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times, trans-
lated by Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 57. For an ac-
count of this shift see Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Na-
ture and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). In particular, “From Deified Nature
to Supernatural Grace”, pp. 167–253.
16
John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1993), p. 168. In addition to McCole’s comments on the conservative cultural
politics of early twentieth century German elites (pp. 156–205), see also: Peter Gay, Weimar
Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), Fritz K. Ringer, The De-
cline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969), Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), and Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime:
Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
152 ELIAS POLIZOES

Benjamin’s eschatological understanding of temporality is deeply indebted to

Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty,17 and, in 1930, he wrote to the author of Political
Theology:
You will receive any day now from the publishers my book The Origin of German Tragic
Drama. (…) You will very quickly recognize how much my book is indebted to you for its
presentation of the doctrine of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Perhaps I may also say,
in addition, that I have also derived from your later works, especially Die Diktatur, a confir-
mation of my modes of research in the philosophy of art from yours in the philosophy of the
state. If the reading of my book allows this feeling to emerge in an intelligible fashion, then
the purpose of my sending it to you will be achieved. 18

Schmitt’s acknowledged and long-lasting19 influence on Benjamin is a delicate is-

sue: insofar as Schmitt later became very closely associated with the Nazis,20
Benjamin’s editors, as well as his English translators and critics, by and large did their

17
Carl Schmitt’s continued presence in Benjamin’s work, even if oblique, always highly modified,
and at first censured by Adorno, has been largely ignored (at least in the scholarship available to
me in Italian and English, and in English translation). In fact, Eric Jacobson, in Metaphysics of
the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2003), risks the following assertion: “It goes without saying that the
term (political theology) here has nothing to do with Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt’s use of it in the
title of a publication in 1923” (5). From the relevant secondary material, I would draw attention
to Samuel Weber’s almost identical pair of articles, “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter
Benjamin and Carl Schmitt”, Diacritics vol. 22, nos. 3–4 (1992): pp. 5–18; “Taking Exception to
Decision: Theatrical-Theological Politics. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt”, in Walter
Benjamin 1892–1940, edited by Uwe Steiner (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 123–137; Lutz
Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1990), pp. 35–52; and Horst Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via
Thomas Hobbes”, Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 247–266.
18
Weber, “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt”, p. 5. Adorno and
Scholem omit this letter to Schmitt from their edition of Benjamin’s correspondence. No refer-
ences to Schmitt appear in the English-language editions of the correspondence.
19
Benjamin would invoke Schmitt’s influence years later as well, when, in what turned out to be a
race against time, he was working on his last text, the aphoristic “On the Concept of History”.
20
A protégé of Hermann Göring, Schmitt (1888–1985) became a Professor at the University of
Berlin in 1933, joined the NDSAP and took over the Presidency of the “Union of National-So-
cialist Jurists” in the same year. In 1934, as the leading Nazi jurist, he became the Edi-
tor-in-Chief of the German Jurists’ Newspaper and justified the “Night of the Long Knives” as
the “highest form of administrative justice”. Despite his clamorous anti-Semitic attacks, in the
wake of a late 1936 attack in an SS publication where he was denounced as a hidden Catholic and
an opportunist whose anti-Semitism was mostly decorative, he lost his high status and positions
he had held for the first years of the Nazi regime. He kept his Professorship at Berlin until the end
of the war and later spent one year in an American internment camp (1945–1946).
SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY “IN THE WAKE OF ROMANTICISM” 153

best to erase the traces of his debt to Schmitt.21 There is, however, significant work
done on Schmitt’s legacy, over the last decade or so. 22
The exception, explains Schmitt, is a “borderline concept”23 that resists all codifi-
cation. “Because a general norm, as represented by an ordinary legal prescription, can
never encompass a total exception, the decision that a real exception exists cannot
therefore be entirely derived from this norm.” At best the exception can be considered
“as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it can-
not be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a performed law”.24 Schmitt,
for whom the fundamental political concepts of modernity had theological roots, ex-
plains that the exception is “analogous to the miracle in theology”.25 Only the sover-
eign, says Schmitt, can perceive the approach of the exception. Whereas Benjamin’s
angel of history, blown out of paradise with his back turned to the future, looks toward
the past and “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet”,26 the sovereign, by contrast, is endowed with the
proleptic abilities of a soothsayer. Able to predict the disaster to come, and hence pro-
claim the state of exception, he has the power to redeem the troubled present, miracu-
lously transforming it into the past of a future only he can fathom.
Once we map Schmitt’s understanding of the sovereign back onto Benjamin’s alle-
gory, we begin to understand that the usurper we meet in the lines that open the “Alle-
gory and Trauerspiel” chapter of The Origin of German Tragic Drama sees the ef-
fects of modernity — “the chaos which followed in the wake of romanticism” — as a
state of exception: a time of extreme peril and danger. In order to save the present
from this disaster, the usurper seizes control of the philosophy of art by distorting the
“genuine notion” of the symbol. In that way he shakes off his immanence to assume

21
Momme Brodersen does not mention Schmitt in his Walter Benjamin: A Biography (translated
by Malcolm R. Green & Ingrida Ligers; London: Verso, 1996); and there are only two short (al-
beit informative) paragraphs in Bernd Witte’s Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography,
translated by James Rolleston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 79–80. For an
account of Adorno’s censoring of Benjamin’s references to Schmitt, see Ellen Kennedy, “Carl
Schmitt and the Frankfurt School”, in Telos vol. 71 (Spring 1987): pp. 37–66.
22
For recent relevant work on Schmitt and Benjamin, see Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer. Il
potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 1995), and “Gigantomachia intorno a un vuoto”,
Stato di eccezione (Homo sacer, II, i) (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), pp. 68–83. See also
Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999), and Jacques
Derrida, “Force of Law”, Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 230–298.
23
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by
George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 3.
24
Ibid., p. 6.
25
Ibid., p. 36.
26
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, in Selected Writings 1938–1940, edited by
Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), vol. 4,
p. 392.
154 ELIAS POLIZOES

the transcendence of something sacred with which he “has nothing more than the
name in common” (Origin 159). Through the regime of the symbol the usurper effects
an anti-modernist revolt bent on curing the world of the rationalization and alienation
endemic to modern life. To do this, the usurper installs “a dictatorship whose utopian
goal will always be to replace the unpredictability of historical accident with the iron
constitution of the laws of nature” (74). What this entails, however, is the aesthe-
ticization of politics to which Benjamin opposes a personification of allegory which
politicizes the study of art.

3. DIVIDED MODERNITY

If in Huizinga’s account allegory arrives on the scene as the late-medieval usurper of

the symbolical order, for Benjamin the symbol is nothing short of the modern usurper
of the allegorical one. To be sure, Benjamin’s allegiance to allegory is as unadulter-
ated as is Huizinga’s siding with the symbol. But what if Benjamin’s urgent response
to a clear-and-present historical danger – allegory – were construed as at once dialec-
tical as well as messianic? In that case, allegory can be said to confront the problem of
anti-modernity – Huizinga’s, that of Weimar cultural conservativism, or, for that mat-
ter, fascism’s aestheticizing of politics – free from philology’s binding and ultimately
partisan binary logic. The question, in other words, has little to do with the choosing
of one side over the other. For such a choice would simplify the issue and circum-
scribe its solution, keeping it within the limits of the aesthetic. Moreover, and perhaps
most importantly, given that the work of the symbol is in fact simplification, such an
either-or settling of accounts remains mired in the symbol’s constitutive tautology.
Clearly, the dispute between symbol and allegory over which term will dominate
the way in which culture is to be understood turns on the overriding term of political
modernity: illegitimacy, of which the usurper is only one type of agent. At both its
ends, Carl Schmitt’s divided heritage confirms that authentic experiences are neces-
sarily fraught with anxiety. As far as Huizinga is concerned, there is
no sadder or deeper fall from human reason than Schmitt’s barbarous and pathetic delusion
about the friend-foe principle. His inhuman cerebrations do not even hold water as a piece of
formal logic. For it is not war that is serious, but peace. War and everything to do with it re-
mains fast in the daemonic and magical bonds of play. Only by transcending that pitiable
friend-foe relationship will mankind enter into the dignity of man’s estate. Schmitt’s brand of
‘seriousness’ merely takes us back to the savage level. 27

27
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1949). (London: Pala-
din/Granada Publishing, 1970) p. 236. Huizinga argues that “[t]he observance of play-rules is
nowhere more imperative than in the relations between countries and states. Once they are bro-
ken, society falls into barbarism and chaos”. He adds: “Now, this is our difficulty: modern war-
fare has, on the face of it, lost all contact with play. (…) By doing so they break the play-rules in-
herent in any system of international law. To that extent their playing at war, as we have called it,
for the sake of prestige is not true play; it, so to speak, plays the play-concept of war false. In con-
SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY “IN THE WAKE OF ROMANTICISM” 155

In the attempt to dismantle Schmitt’s savagery within a more comprehensive and

rational (i.e. rule-bound) model, Huizinga concludes that:
Carl Schmitt’s acceptance of the formula that war is the ‘serious development of an emer-
gency’ is therefore correct – but in a very different sense from that which he intended. His
point of view is that of the aggressor who is not bound by ethical considerations. The fact re-
mains that politics and war are deeply rooted in the primitive soil of culture played in and as
contest. Only through an ethos that transcends the friend-foe relationship and recognizes a
higher goal than the gratification of the self, the group, or the nation, will a political society
pass beyond the ‘play’ of war to true seriousness.28

Huizinga vies for peace and seriousness filtered through the harmless playing at
war, his thinking predicated upon a contract of mutual recognition. While there is no
room here for the inescapable hostility of the friend-enemy distinction, Huizinga
nonetheless does away with Schmitt, the consummate and demonic champion of
post-Kultur, the martial enemy of homo ludens, and in that way protects against the
inimical distortions that would transform the otherness of one’s opponent into an un-
recognizable enemy. The true agon for Huizinga is played out between equals in the
fluidity and seamlessness of what ultimately turns out to be a symbolic frame of refer-
ence. Benjamin’s allegorical framework, by contrast, with all its rhizomatic prolifera-
tions – mystical, Marxist, messianic – cannot be accounted for in symbolic terms. Af-
ter all, for Benjamin the symbol is that which is invoked as the stand-in for a unity or
synthesis that no longer obtains. In that respect, it is always an unacknowledged, if not
disavowed, allegory of the symbol, and those who would wield it do so to redeem the
injuries not only of history but also of the present. Huizinga, for one, accomplishes
this by lowering mass culture to the common denominator of puerilism, by reasserting
the values of an eternal culture viewed as a-temporal play, and, in the end, by a whole-
sale ditching of modernity as an age of decline.
Benjamin’s take on modernity, from Baudelaire’s to that of the age of mechanical
reproducibility culminating in the 1930s, is more complex and engages the mass phe-
nomena that Huizinga shuns. For him, the symbol is the tool of escapism, which helps
one to evade oneself once history has arrived at the point of exception.29 Benjamin
would regard Huizinga’s playful man as the one evading oneself: as homo eludens. In
Benjaminian terms, the subject of the symbol aims to become its own sovereign. The

temporary politics, based as they are on the utmost preparedness if not actual preparation for
war, there would seem to be hardly any trace of the old play-attitude. The code of honour is
flouted, the rules of the game are set aside, international law is broken, and all the associations of
war with ritual and religion are gone” (237).
28
Ibid., p. 238.
29
Huizinga, who aligns the mental attitude of the medieval imagination with “the wisdom of prim-
itive man, the child, the poet, or the mystic” (Autumn 237), fits the third phase in Stock’s
periodization of medieval revivals: “The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to de-
fine itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics re-
vived them in order to escape from themselves” (Stock, op. cit., p. 69).
156 ELIAS POLIZOES

only way of coming to terms with the world outside of the confines of war or totalitari-
anism is to (innocently or irresponsibly?) play it safe with symbols. The ecstasy of the
symbolic occurs when sovereignty is traded for playfulness and when, instead of be-
coming a Philosopher King, the thinker dresses as a Magister ludi.
At the other end, the subject of allegory (which simultaneously is the being subject
to allegory) is stuck within history, where it fights and suffers without more than tem-
porary recourse to symbolic surrogates. Schmitt’s logic, rather than being one of war,
represented the clear framing of urgency, which inspired Benjamin’s elaborations
upon the high anxiety that transcends illegitimacy and melancholia on its way to
becoming messianic.